The only benefit is that we get a different error message for aspecific kind of firmware defect. For someone bringing up a platformwith new firmware that uses a string _UID or is defective, this mightsave five minutes. But the extra code takes up space in *everybody's*kernel all the time.

And it makes the code more complicated because it adds adependency on "device->flags.unique_id", so code readers now haveto figure out what that means and whether it is set correctly.

Maybe it would be worthwhile to change the second error message tosomething like this:

printk(KERN_ERR PREFIX "Evaluating processor _UID (%x)\n", status);

Then one could probably distinguish the "_UID didn't exist" error fromthe "_UID is not an integer" error.